Knights Templar
Knights Templar: To defend the innocent and the Church from violent attack. Mission Statement Our Alliance is dedicated to helping each member have a productive and prosperous city in the fastest means available. We offer our time, resources and wisdom to each and every member. We grow as one, fight as one, defend as one. "This is a 'Quick Start' guide to point you in the right direction." This site is for all Knights Templar members and anyone else to post whatever they feel they want to share. Post past experiences, lessons learned, whatever. I will try to update it with my recipes for troop production and what not! Most of this I have learned from the Wiki but will cut and paste snippets of info I see useful. You do the same if you would like. Thank you for the participation! Points To Ponder *The quote and historical references are just historical excerpts from the wikipedia and by no means reflect the gameplay. There are NO religious overtones here as there is no need for them here. Play the game as any and have fun and never take it too serious! *I know a lot of you will find this info way too redundant - you megamighters! But, when I first started out, I wished there was someone around that I could constantly bug and annoy about what I should be doing. I hope you high and mighty ones will add to this page so the rest of us can move up with you. *Reminder: These steps are by no means set in stone - there are a myriad of ways to go about this game. That's why this page is here. Just because I give an example doesn't make it right. I hope others that read this will decide to add their own experiences to this page because I want to learn as well! (It's easy! Click on 'edit this page' at the top and have at it - don't be shy!) Quote A Templar Knight is truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armor of faith, just as his body is protected by the armor of steel. He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men. (Bernard of Clairvaux, 1135) Members (Excalibur130 domain) Chancellor: Lady Silvermist Vice Chancellor: Lord Deanamal Vice Chancellor: Lord Zecarias Officers: Lord Lazerius, Lord Lockraven, Lord Rastlin History The Knights Templar were the elite fighting force of their day, highly trained, well-equipped and highly motivated; one of the tenets of their religious order was that they were forbidden from retreating in battle. They were the first warrior monks of the western world. They had the full support of the Pope, paid no taxes, were allowed to cross any border and were not subject to any authority except that of the Pope. They had to sign over all their assets to fight for the cause. They invented banking (some say that is how Switzerland got started) and had secret codes to keep track of assets and property. Crests of the Knights Templar References Refer to this page: Defensive Strategy Then, read this page on Building an Army and then check out the Offensive Strategy page. Kingdoms of Camelot Wiki Wikipedia General Info Your first city will be dropped in a random "province". Go to map view and get an idea of your surroundings. Each tile/space has a wilderness of some type or a city or barbarian camp. You can capture these wilds to take advantage of these resources. You can drag the map around with your hand icon. Notice the red lines? These mark the boundaries of provinces. When you get ready to build your next city, you might want to consider placing it in another province to take advantage of the different market rates when you want to buy or sell some of your resources. Some people like to keep their cities close to cut down on times when it comes to transferring goods but not much a factor. The first page I like to really delve into is the ''Defensive Strategy'' page. The first paragraph is understanding how the game works - gloss over the rest of the page. The remainder of the page will become more pertinent as time goes on. The next page I really like to focus on is Building an Army . This is the meat of the game. Remember to keep your resources balanced. You can easily run out of resources and even over-extend yourself to the point where you start to lose food, gold, etc and this will cause a ripple effect. Lose food, your troops desert; lose gold and your knights desert. 'Setting Up Your City' At first, you will want to follow your Quests guide - this will help you get going in the right direction until you get the feel of it. To help, I've included a sample of one of my cities and the number of buildings I have in it. I start out with the required buildings, embassy, knight's hall, barracks, cottages, etc. Your resources will come from fields immediately outside your city that you acquire with each level of castle upgrade. I personally focus on farms as the majority. Example: Level 9 Castle, I have 15 farms, 7 sawmills, 8 mines and 7 quarries. As your troops increase, you will need more and more food to keep them fed. Again, this is just an example - you will need to determine what resources you need to maintain your city. If you would rather have more sawmills to supply your archers then so be it. You can always "Deconstruct " a field or building and then rebuild over the same tile with what you need. Thing to consider when using deconstruct - If you are tearing down a cottage to make room for a barracks, remember to upgrade one other cottage before you tear down the cottage in question. This prevents your population from taking a hit as your population will drop by tearing down this cottage. Increase Might If you want to increase might fast, refer to this page . This page shows you which buildings and troops generate the most might and the rate at which you get this might. Check out the column that shows you the most 'bang for your buck' (might per minute). Troop Production My example city has 13 barracks in it. The first barracks is lvl 9 and the remainder are at least lvl 6 and up (it's a work in progress). This setup gives me 7 1/2 archers per minute or 450 archers per hour. You can increase this by having more barracks and 'upping' the levels of your remaining barracks. You must make sure that your resource levels can keep up. AND, make sure your population can support it. Don't train 1000 archers when you only have 450 people in "Idle Population". Note: Having 13 barracks only leaves room for 7 cottages - these must be leveled up to keep up with your troop population and resource production. Refer to Barracks and Training Speed to get a better idea on this topic. 'Appoint Knights' Appoint knights as soon as you can. These knights aid in resource collection, research, combat and politics. As your knight's experience grows, so does his/her salary. Watch out for this or you will find yourself in a negative gold situation. You will have to adjust your tax rate accordingly - I like to have it barely above break even. Maybe a little more to pad in case your forget about your knight's salary. If you need more gold, use the Increase Gold button. This forces each citizen to pay up 10 gold immediately but will decrease your city's happiness by 20 points. Don't go below 50 happiness or bad things happen. You can increase your tavern level to offset your tax rate to allow for a happier city! 'Embassy' This is a good time to mention it - upgrade your embassy soon. This allows you to keep other troops from your alliance that have been sent to aid you in battle. If you have been constantly attacked and have had enough, ask for help and other members of your alliance will send troops to reinforce your city. The higher the level of your embassy, the more troops you can house. Remember though, your food resources will be used to feed these added troops. Also, they cannot Hide in Sanctuary like you can with your city troops. If someone attacks you, these troops will fight. Second City To get your second city, you will need 10 friends that play KoC to have as 'your' friend. Ask the alliance officers for help in this. They can get your request out to the entire alliance and ask members to provide you with friend requests. Use these friends as your knights because you can reward these members that step up to help you. This allows for a more give and take atmosphere which is always good. Once you have your second city, start setting it up. Some things to consider: Do you want to make a copy of your first? I try to have different setups per city. One city can crank out lots of archers; the other city cranks out lots of resources to support the first city and so on. Once you have your second city rolling, start planning for your third city. To get this, you must capture wilds level 5 and higher to find crests. (Look in the subcat Crests in the Wilderness) Please use the charts in conquering these wilds - believe me, they will save you a lot of time, frustration and resources. No point in capturing a wild when you lose half your army! Wall/Field Defenses From what I have learned about''' these (being very little), I can't say much here. If anyone has experience with being attacked and what they had versus what someone attacked with and losses, I would love to know. Anyone can cut and paste their attack report here - that would be awesome. I've heard caltrops for archers versus traps - I dunno. Refer to this page, Offensive Strategy and scroll down to 'Cleaner Waves' and read that and hopefully it will enlighten you. You can also go to your Alliance tab and select Reports to scroll through to find various attack reports to pick out any useful info. In your attack report, you will see who attacked who. Find their name and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of your KoC page - see the 'Leaderboard' word at the bottom of the page? Click on this and you can do a member search or an alliance search. This will tell you the members' coordinates and strength! A handy thing to remember indeed. While on this subject, the Watch Tower is extremely important. Try to level this up as soon as you can. This will notify you of an impending attack, who it is, how many and when. The higher the level, the more info you will have which is extremely important to you. The higher levels will allow you time to prepare for a defense or get your gold and resources out of there (to your second city or a wild) to ride out the storm (Blue Oyster Cult reference - gotta love em). Here is a copy of my attack report during a recent campaign. The top half is my troops; the lower half is what I was up against. There were no troops defending. The 'only' thing I had to go up against was 6500 wall mounted crossbows (Deadly!). Knight Combat Skill: 76 Attack Boosted: 20% Defense Boosted: 20% Knight Combat Skill: None *I advise only attacking Wall Mounted Crossbows with Swordsmen, Archers will always suffer heavy losses considering they don't actually go IN and take them out, they just fire arrows at them. You will note that my 390 ballista were wiped out along with 12339 archers! This was also using Barkskin and Bloodlust which increases your defense and attack strength by 20% respectively. So it appears that the crossbows have nearly a 3 to 1 kill ratio. Had there been caltrops there, I think I would have taken much more of a hit. By the way, my fletching was Lvl 9, metal alloys Lvl 9, poisoned edge Lvl 9. '''Attacks on Cities Here is an attack report from an alliance member, Lord Shagmaster. He went after a 'white' castle with formidable defenses and I am pasting that report here as an example of what it takes to bring down a lvl 10 castle. Battle Report - Victory'Attackers breached the walls.Attackers (**********) - ()'Winner Knight Combat Skill: 90 Defenders (*********) Knight Combat Skill: Higher Gold: 3669207'Food:' 2814677'Wood:' 1058392'Stone:' 924392'Ore:' 252144Back Wilderness Attacks I recommend you capture wilds somewhere other than right next to your city. This makes it easy for an opponent to 'snipe' your wilds out from under you. They normally try to do this when your not online like at 2 am (pssst! Remember that I mentioned using the whisper mode in chat? You can use this to find out if they are online) - then you wake up the next morning and find out that your might has dropped by 50 thousand or so! (This has happened to me!) What they have done is capture your wilds with two scouts! One will die, the other is for the victory! A cheap way to get a wild but then they will recall and abandon the wild leaving your poor city to starve. Once the food runs out, your troops desert on you and there goes your might. The KoC gods have just introduced a way to protect your wild . You can now hire mercenaries and or set traps on your wilds. Hiring mercenaries is expensive. I put traps on mine. It only costs you gold - not resources which is cool. You can also use your wilds to hide gold and other resources. As a last resort, I will send out my entire army with all my gold and typically ore - whatever you have an abundance of and Reinforce my wild with these. Check this page out to learn more tips for protect your stuff . This is my experience with wildernesses only. Refer to the wilds page to see what it "recommends" for you to have before you attack a certain level of wilds. For instance: To capture a lvl 5 wilderness, it recommends you send in two waves: The first wave is commonly known as the 'meat' wave. This wave of troops you will write off with exception of your knight - the knight will always return. This first wave is designed to git rid of all the traps, etc and clear the way for your next wave. Back to the lvl 5 wild: First wave - send 50 supply or militia and select your knight and then march. Now, click on the target again to select your next wave of attackers. Don't fiddle-fart around! You must send this second wave ASAP! If you wait too long, the traps will regen and you will lose some unaccounted-for troops on your second wave. The second wave must always include the slowest member of your first wave. This allows for proper timing. If you forget to choose 1 slow member for your second wave, it could actually overtake your first wave and there you go again, losing more troops than you planned for. So, second wave for this example will be 2500 archers plus 1 supply or militia, then your knight (this must be an 'IDLE' knight (one not assigned a role)) and then MARCH! You CANNOT recall your troops once you click the march button - not yet anyway. So, make sure the coordinates are correct and the troop strength is correct or you will live to regret it. If you select the troops and no coordinates, you will march to 0,0 and watch your troops get slaughtered! There is someone at 0,0 and their might is decent so be wary. By the way, you must have a Rally Point of level 2 to send two waves and lvl 3 to send three waves, etc. Here's how it goes (LEVEL 5 WILD): #In map view, click on the wild you want to capture (pay attention to see if it's owned by someone - you might just tick some one off). #Click on 'Attack' and then choose your meat wave of 50 militia. #Select your idle knight (good time here to make a mental note of the estimated time of arrival (ETA)). #Click on 'March'. #IMMEDIATELY click on the wild again and select your Kick butt wave. #Select ONE militia and then select your archers (enter 2500 in this space). #Choose your idle knight #2 (preferably the knight with the most combat experience), glance at this waves ETA and make sure it won't pass your first wave. #Click on 'March'. #You will notice a little pop-up message showing the march times of both waves on your map. #After both waves arrive (your first wave will start returning (the lone knight) as your second wave arrives) you will get two reports that come in. First report will show you lost (the meat wave), second wave will show victory! #Go to your city view and select Rally Point and then the Troop Movement tab and recall your second wave. #The wild is now yours! In map view, you will see your crest on the wild showing it's yours. Note: When selecting a wild to attack, there will be no crest on it showing it belongs to anyone. The only way to see if it's owned is by clicking on it. Note: You can pretty much use this procedure in attacking a barbarian camp but please refer to the barbarian camp page for recommended troops to conquer different levels. Attack Tables The first 7 levels are pretty much cut and dry (Use the charts on the Wilderness page for those). Levels 8 through 10 however can be manipulated with various results. The numbers posted here are what I had at the time of attack - NOT what was recommended. If there's something more I can add to this, please let me know. The blanks are there for you to fill in with your results. Please use 'center justify' for continuity. I really don't think the Poisoned Edge level makes a difference but added it to compare results. *Note: Lord Zecarias pointed out something I had never utilized before until he mentioned this. The 'Reassign' button. If your city doesn't quite have what these charts recommend, you can always transfer some troops from one city to the other by this button. In map view from the city you want to move troops FROM, click on the city you want to move troops TO and then click the reassign button - then enter the amounts of each troop you want to send over, then March. You do not need to use a knight. Remember! When these troops get there, your food intake had better be able to support these additional numbers! You will see your food/hour take a huge hit depending on how many and what kind of troops you just reassigned. * Notice the difference between the Lvl 9 wilds with and without the use of Ballista? It seems the Ballista are worth much more than archers in terms of losing troops. Just a few hundred Ballista can cut down archer losses. What does one ballista equal in archer strength? From the difference of the two Lvl 9 wilds with and without the use of ballista, it seems the ballista's are about 6 1/3 archers in effectiveness, give or take. This is the report on the last Lvl 8 wild I conquered. Battle at Grassland Lv.8 (430,629) - Conquered Aug 19, 10:13 Report No: 1914639 You were victorious! The Attackers secured the Wilderness.Loot'Gold:' 0'Food:' 8,000'Wood:' 0'Stone:' 0'Ore:' 0 Share a story to your wall asking your friends to help you search for extra loot or recover lost troops!Back to ReportsShare to Wall Attackers(Deanamal) - (450,633)Winner Knight Combat Skill: 85 Defenders(Enemy) Knight Combat Skill: None **As an example of what happens when you do not use the wilderness charts, I pulled this attack report from our alliance tab and even though the attacker was victorius, look at how many troops were lost. Granted you can only do with what you have but sometimes, patience is a virtue (Lvl 8 Wild). Winner Knight Combat Skill: 75 Defenders (Enemy) Knight Combat Skill: None Loot'Gold:' 0'Food:' 8000'Wood:' 0'Stone:' 0'Ore:' 0 You will notice that this member lost 77 Militia, 1271 Swordsmen, and 1004 Archers. That's quite a hit trying to take a Level 8 wilderness. The total troop loss was 2352 soldiers. Following the chart above would have only cost 300 militia + 475 archers totaling 775 troops. Now, if I had waited for my archer strength to increase and had way more ballista than I do now, I could have cut those losses even more. Anyway, add your experiences on the table if you like. I really want to see more Level 9 and 10 results. Third City To get your third city, you will have to conquer level 5 wilds and higher to get the crests you need. The higher the wild, the greater the chance you will find a crest? I don't know about this. Refer to the crests in wilderness page and tournament of crests page to figure this out. Crests and Crest Research . Hunting for crests is a royal pain in the *%$. Seriously - you will have to spend a lot of troops (meat waves) and time trying to find these crests. I haven't had the pleasure of looking for the highest crests that you need for your fourth city! You will have to attack lvl 10 wilds to find these! Level 10 wilds means that your first wave will consist of 1200 militia. This is what you will 'write off' for each and every lvl 10 wild - talk about losses! Plan on losing around 60k militia to find these crests - from what I've heard. I hope someone will post their experiences here and their tactics so we can learn from this. Anyone? Divine Inspiration I want to talk about DIvine Inspiration (DI). It seems that you need one of these for every level 10 building you want to build. I wished it was like the research - once you attain that level, it follows you from city to city. Also, it costs you 50 gems to get one unless you're lucky enough to have one given to you by the KoC god every once in awhile! There is some debate over which building you will want to use your DI. Most experienced players say to use it on the Alchemy lab. This makes sense. With a level 10 lab, you can do much more research to gain might and build weapons. I am finding out that to have level 10 farming research, you also need a level 10 farm! Why? I could be wrong on this but the page gods seem like they want you to 'support' their efforts with your hard earned cash - I can't blame them but come on! Diplomacy After all is said and done, this is a game of attrition and battles. But, it's also a game of diplomacy . A lot of your alliance officer's time is spent smoothing the ruffled feathers of its members and members of other alliances. A lot of behind the scenes stuff. There's always someone taking the wild from another, someone scouting another and the one being scouted starts complaining, someone being 'farmed' (when your city is attacked for its resources), someone going off half-cocked and then there's always someone wanting to kick some you-know-what just because! Well, C'est la Vie! All I'm saying is that you should try to be diplomatic if you are in an alliance. Everyone joins an alliance for several reasons: support in resources, knowledge and might. Respect other members in that alliance and remember that your actions will affect everyone else in your alliance. Go through the proper channels and you'll do just fine. Also, pick the brains of your officers and your might leaders - you'll be surprised just how much they are willing to offer in supporting you with their resources and wisdom! When Diplomacy Fails We recently went to war to assist a friendly alliance of ours. I want to include some lessons learned here since this was my first experience in an all-out-war. #Coordinate your attacks. Not just with other members of your alliance - first and foremost with yourself. I will pick out a target and scout it. Scouting will give your enemy a 'heads up' alert but I prefer to know what I'm getting in to. #Coordinate with other members. Someone normally takes charge and lays out a game plan. We first decide what targets we want to go after - typically the officers or the might leaders (usually one and the same but not always). We then decide to go after these targets hitting their wilds first (starve them) and then attack their cities. #Have the member with the longest distance attack first. If several members are attacking the same city at the same time, it would be best if you all arrived there at roughly the same time. Don't know if it's necessary but makes sense. Maybe stage the attacks - anyone know if it makes a difference? #Someone should keep track of what's being attacked. I know you can go by the reports but I'm finding out that up to date info is necessary in keeping everyone involved. #A very crafty opponent who had three cities kept playing the shell game with his resources. We would scout, see his army and loads of resources, attack, only to come back empty-handed and taking a hit from his wall defenses. He would then relocate his army and resources to another city or maybe a wild (Still haven't figured this one out!). What was convenient to him was a multitude of cities from his own alliance surrounding him. If we could have had enough members at the same time to hit all the cities in that area, then I think we might have delivered a mighty blow. As it was, we just spent a lot of time marching (over 2 hour march each way). War Preparation When the call is given to prepare for war, here are a few steps that I recommend. Again, these are not in any order and the validity is from my experience only. I keep hoping someone out there that has more experience or a better idea can add to this but here we go. Your leaders will normally give you a heads up so you have a little time to prepare but I always believe in the old addage, "The best offense is a good defense." #Wall/Field Defenses: You should always be working on these. Whenever I train troops, I also will train some wall or field defenses. I still haven't decided what's better on the field - caltrops vs traps. Traps can be sprung on a one-to-one basis and someone told me that caltrops are 3 to 1. I don't know but you need to use these in conjunction with wall mounted crossbows for max effectiveness. By the time most of your buildings are level 9, your field defenses should be maxed out. Not a rule of thumb but the faster you get this done, the least likely you are to be farmed. #Follow the guide on protecting your resources . Have your Storehouse leveled up as fast as you can. Also, research Shrinking Powder. When you are attacked, these two things will allow you to save as much resources as possible when you get farmed. #Watch Tower: Get this building leveled up to at least 8. This will give you info on the size of the army and when it will hit you. This will give you time to decide if you want to defend or hide in the sanctuary (click on your castle to set this). If your army easily will defeat your attacker, set to defend and teach the attacker a lesson. If not, then hide. Get your resources and gold out of there. Move them to your other city or hide in a wilderness you already own. I was getting farmed quite often by a person who liked to attack at 0'dark 30. It was always at 2:30am when I'm not online. So, I started hiding my gold in a wild with my entire army there. You take a chance of taking a hit on your army but the decision is yours. #Your Army: I don't waste time/resources with Pikemen. I typically stay with archers and cavalry. I also have a good amount of ballista. It seems most attackers use this formula as well but there are some out there with a total mixed bag. I don't have much experience and data on attacks vs defense but you can find this on the wiki and also by going to your alliance tab and digging through all the battle reports - tedious yes but enlightening. Pikemen are good vs cavalry but not much else. #Your wilds: When you start getting archer numbers in the 30-40k, you will find that most of your wilds are for food. The enemy knows this. They can seriously cripple you just by sniping your wild out from under you. Defend your wilds! At least have traps on them so they can't be taken by just a few scouts. The higher level wild (9 or 10) might want to be defended by hiring mercenaries. Again, that's your call. If I'm notified we are about to go to war, I'll hire some mercs at that time for my most important wilds. #Use your items of Barkskin/Bloodlust, what have you, if you can. These will aid in the defense/attack strength of your troops. #Jump in to alliance chat and ask what you can do. Sometimes it's just a general order to attack the other alliance - remember, there is no honor here. If you see an enemy city close to you and you way outmatch them, too bad for them! Other times, there may be a coordinated attack against the alliance leader who typically has 3 or 4 cities. You can assist there or maybe by going after the leaders' wilds while the stronger players attack his/her cities. #Make sure you have plenty of expendable troops (militia and scouts). You will need a good amount of scouts to scout cities of considerable might. I was using about 3000 scouts and that got wiped out real quick on one city. This wiki suggested having 60k scouts for some players! That may be overkill but better too many than not enough when you need to find out what's going on behind your opponents walls. #Attacking is fun! Don't make it personal. We clobbered one opponent and after all was said and done, he responded by messaging our entire alliance to let us know how much fun he had and that we were worthy adversaries! A very honorable thing to do and say! Well, that's about as far as I have gone in this game. Haven't been involved in a lot of battles - yet. So, anyone want to take this over from here? Please do so! More to follow! Category:Alliances